


Tales of the Watchers' Compound

by orphan_account



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Angst, F/F, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Lonely Wesley, Magic, Magic-Users, Student-Watcher Wesley, Teacher-Student Relationship, Traditions, Training, Vampires, Watchers, Workplace, Workplace Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-22
Updated: 2015-09-22
Packaged: 2018-04-22 20:53:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4850165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of <em>"Meanwhile, Back in England"</em> prequel pieces to <em>The Transformations Quartet</em>, my AU Buffy Season 4, exploring the end of Helena Penglis's time as the Slayer, Giles's assignment as Buffy's Watcher, and Wesley's final year of Watcher training.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. All Upstream from Here (complete)

**Author's Note:**

> This story is a fairly strenuous reworking of the very first fanfic I ever wrote. Hello again, my firstborn! It's set during the Watcher kayaking trip Giles mentions in Season 3:
> 
>  
> 
> _Giles: "I'll see if I can reach her Watcher at the retreat. They're eight hours ahead now. Yes, they're probably sitting down to a nightcap. I wonder if they still kayak. I used to love a good kayak. You see, they don't even consider--."_  
>  Buffy: "..."  
> Giles: "Sorry, I digress."
> 
>  
> 
> Cozzie=swimming costume, or what we Americans call a swimsuit.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On a kayaking trip in the Cotswolds, Wesley's Handler tells him a few home truths about being a Watcher that rather fly in the face of tradition.

"I hear whispered, Wesley, that you've submitted your name to the Active list.  Are these whispers accurate?" Her Ladyship asked as I lay beside her, panting, on the riverbank.  Nothing improper, mind you.  Her Ladyship is my Handler, final supervisor of my Watcher Training.  She serves on the High Council, the only female of the Seven, and to be chosen to train with her is thought a high honour indeed--which, please do not mistake me, I believe it truly is.

It's only that Her Ladyship is also... Her Ladyship.  To say I find her intimidating is as if to say, "Isn't Hell warm this time of year?"  She appears to be everything males of my sort and Class find inducing of terror.  We were brought up to believe we were superior to all others, meant to rule the world, and yet there she is:  brilliant, ferociously well-educated, courageous, self-willed, physically powerful and entirely independent.

She kept the last Slayer, the one before the current fluffy, small one, alive for twelve years in the field.  There is a corded white scar all around the circumference of her throat, and in the front it is broad as my thumb.  Her eyes are wide, green as emeralds, and very beautiful.  In the back of them, I believe, lurks madness.

This is a women who ought to have died.  Who was _abandoned_ to die by our own kind, if the stories are to be believed, and yet she walks and works amongst us.

"Ah, well...  Er, yes, actually. Yes, I have.  Ma'am."

Her Ladyship specializes in inscrutable looks, of the sort that bore through the bones of one's skull, pierce the brain, and cause the manhood, at times, to shrivel.  It might perhaps help to know Her Ladyship's family name:  it is LeFaye.  She is Lady LeFaye, though she prefers to be called "Ms. St. Ives" or simply "St. Ives"."

I could not force myself to call Her Ladyship "St. Ives" to save my immortal soul, nor could the others of my Hand (as we call our Handler-assigned training cadres).

And, yes, that was "LeFaye," as in Morgana of that name, who it's said brought about the fall of Camelot.  Her Ladyship could doubtless bring down Camelot on a tea break and still have time for a biscuit and a cuppa. That her own given name is "Moira" seems, to me, slightly too alike for comfort.

Her Ladyship leaned back against the kayak, one knee drawn up to her chest, everything about her--though she must surely have been past forty in age--smooth, sleek and powerful. Back in the seventies, it was rumoured, she'd gone to the Olympics, though in which event I could not recall.

"What does Travers have to say about it?" she asked, with every appearance that she'd begun to scan the backs of my eyeballs for further clues.

"Uncle Quentin's already agreed to sponsor me. He believes I show great promise."

The expression on my face may have been less than properly humble. I'm often told it appears so.  Just that morning, over breakfast in the Commons, my fellow third-year Candidate Maria del Cielo had called me insufferable, but I'm not insufferable, or not entirely.

Del Cielo would not share my boat, she went with Quatermass, and Her Ladyship had to take me.

"Has he?" Lady LeFaye replied. " _Does_ he?"

It would not have required a magnet of any strength to detect the presence of irony in her voice, but even after three years in her company, I could not be precisely sure exactly what caused it.

"Take off your wetsuit, Wesley."

"I beg your pardon! Your Ladyship!" She had surprised me--though one heard insinuations. A blush rose from my collar to the tips of my ears.

"Have it off, silly boy. Your ever-so-precious virtue's safe with me."

At least she did not say, as del Cielo had been known to, "Oh, look, Wes!  A unicorn!  I think it's waiting for you to approach!"

Her Ladyship rose to her feet in one motion, a true Amazon. The two of us looked nearly eye to eye. Without question, she is wonderfully beautiful, in a feral and predatory way, as an eagle or a falcon can be beautiful.

Her teeth flashed white in the shadows of the riverside trees.

"You didn't forget to wear your cozzie underneath, did you, Wesley?" She laughed.

"No. Ah. Ah. Good Lord, no," I stammered, thankful that I had indeed remembered to don my swimming costume before this day's excursion, and feeling no end the fool.

"Well, have it off then." Lady LeFaye folded her arms across her chest. The tight sleeves of Her Ladyship's own wetsuit molded to exquisitely-defined muscles.

She was stronger than one ever expected, merciless in her training, both in the realms of the physical and of the intellectual. I could never tell if she liked or hated me.

 _Her Ladyship is quite old enough to be your...  aunt,_ I reminded myself, nervous with those cool, brilliantly-green eyes upon me.

"Please remember, I've been your Handler for three years, Wesley. Do relax. This is merely another lesson. No more need to be nervous here, with me, than you would have been reading an essay to your old college tutor ten years past."

Given that my Balliol tutor, Mr. Hemmings, had been sixty if a day, and possessed of spectacles with lenses thicker than storm-windows, I failed to accept the comparison. Reluctantly, not understanding Her Ladyship's intent--or fearing I understood it only too well--I tugged down the zip, pulling the second skin of Neoprene away from my body until the upper part of the suit hung about my waist.

"Far enough," Her Ladyship told me, smiling. "My, you are pretty, aren't you? Quite the lovely young man. What's this?"

Her fingers found the small white scar along my lower ribs, the touch strong and icy, much like the touch of the vampire we'd faced together out in the wilds of Hampstead Heath. I'd hated that part, one of the "New Disciplines," brought about by people like Lady LeFaye, and that odd man, Giles, in California, as if our old ways weren't good enough.

 _Pure bosh!_ my Uncle Quentin said. _Watchers watch, Slayers slay._

 _But Uncle's Slayer lasted no more that six months,_ my inner voice reminded me.

I bade it be still. That voice can often be disloyal, and it never helps me.

Though I knew only recent contact with the chilly river made Her Ladyship's skin so cold, I could not contain a shudder.

I'd grown accustomed to her in dark wool bespoke suits and French perfume, or kitted out for fencing. Seen close-to, here at the edge of the Wildwood, and garbed in her shark-gray second skin, she reminded me strangely of one of them. The Enemy.

What was it Friedrich Nietzsche wrote?

_"He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee."_

Yes, that was it.  To say "gazed," or "stared," as the quote was often translated, would scarcely make a difference.

 _For twelve years,_ I reminded myself.  For twelve years, Her Ladyship stared, and stared, and knowing her (if anyone could know her), she would never have once looked away.

"H-horse. Kicked me. Age twelve."

"And this?" The chilly touch traced up my chest, to the triangular scar just beneath my collarbone.

"Ah, er, at the seaside. I was five. I'd been tormenting my sisters, and the youngest, Caterina, threw a stone at me."

Her Ladyship laughed softly. "Fair aim."

I cleared my throat.

"I believe she intended to strike my head."

A second laugh, dangerous and dark.

"Wesley, you've made it past thirty nearly unscathed. Is that all there is to see?"

"Yes, Your Ladyship." I straightened, attempting to hold fast to my dignity. "I suppose that it is."

"Very well." Abruptly, her fingers left my body. She worked the zip of her own suit, shedding the gray casing as a serpent sheds its skin, baring the paleness beneath.

"My Slayer..." she said, jagged small traces of the madness behind her eyes showing now within her voice.

For a few moments she merely breathed, the sort of breathing one does when trying hard as one can not to weep.

"Hear that?  After years, I still cannot speak my lovely's name aloud!  They Called her at fifteen, and for twelve years we kept one another alive. Twelve years, first in New Orleans, then Budapest, then Pottersville, a small town in the north of the state of Maine. Have you read my journals, Wesley?"

I shook my head, caught up, horrified, by what I saw. "Wasn't allowed, Your Ladyship."

"Weren't you? Oh, of course you were not!  Why should you be forearmed or forewarned?  Here..."

Freed now entirely from her wetsuit, she touched a scar that ran at an angle, the full length of one long thigh.

"I fell thirty feet, onto broken glass. Unconscious for four days. They put a pin in the bone. Here..."  Her fingers traveled over a semi-circle of deep triangular pits in her forearm. "Bitten through. Here..."

She turned her back to me, lifting the long mahogany plait of her hair. Two broad white stripes angled over her shoulderblades, as if she'd once possessed angelic wings, but some cruel hand had cut them, jaggedly, away.

"It had claws. I never saw it coming. Here..." Turning to face me, she caught hold of my hands and brought them to her hip, fore and aft. Through her swimming costume, I felt the puckered, circular scars.

"The vampire who did this was once called William the Bloody, though now, I believe, he goes by the name of Spike. As in the great nails that are used to secure railroad ties into the earth. We didn't get him. He's still alive--or, at least, undead--out there.  And here..."

Lady LeFaye raised her chin, laying my hand against the one scar I'd known about, despite all her blouses with high collars, all the polo-necked jumpers she wore.

The skin felt corrugated, heavily ridged.  She should not have lived.  No one could have lived, not through something that caused a scar such as this.

Her Ladyship's gaze trapped mine--and so, what was _I_ staring into?

"That one was the last. You're perfectly correct.  I ought to have died."

She looked down, and realized then that she had wept, was weeping, that the sudden wetness on my wrist was the brine of her tears.

"I ought to have died when my Slayer died. I ought not to be here." Her Ladyship turned away roughly, skinning back into her suit.

"To become involved with one's Slayer in that way," I told her, callow, sanctimonious prat that I was, "Lies in direct opposition to all our directives."

Her Ladyship treated me to a round of bitter laughter.

"Tell yourself that, Wesley. Sit amongst your books, plan your strategies, let your Slayer be a willing little soldier, march her forth every night to war. After all, our cause is just, our cause is true."

"Our cause _is_ just." I began to struggle into my own suit.

"Oh, yes. Quite," she spat out. "And if one dies, another is Called."

"That's certainly true."

Then, I could not understand her tone. This was war, and in war, it's the sad truth, soldiers die. If we felt otherwise, we could not do the work we ourselves were called to do.

Yes, we would do our best to protect our Slayers, but we were Watchers, not warriors, and our skills, gained through time and diligence, should not be lightly thrown away.

Our laws, our traditions, too, had been shaped by time.

Lady LeFaye sat on the High Council itself. How could she not understand these truths?

Her Ladyship watched me silently as the shadows lengthened, until we stood in near dark.

"They can smell us, you know," she said at last. "The vampires. They come for us in the night. If your Slayer does not love you, she may not care. One more stuffy prat issuing orders--why _should_ she care? The Council can make others, they can send more."

She bent, righting the kayak, gathering paddles. "You are a marvelous researcher, Wesley. You know languages and folklore, and can lay a name to most any bloody thing I throw your way. You can quote Watcher theory and tradition at me until your face turns blue. But this game takes more than brains: it takes cunning, it takes heart, and it takes balls.

"You know the lifespan of the average Slayer, I imagine--do you know how long the average Watcher lasts after activation? And you may glare at me all you like." A slight smile. "I've faced worse."

I lowered my gaze; I had indeed been glaring.

Her Ladyship's voice dropped. "Have you been to the place in the country where the old Watchers live? The ones who weren't lucky?"

"Good God, no." I twisted my paddle out of her hands, and refloated our craft in the river. "Excuse me, please, Your Ladyship, but this attitude..." I slid into my place, in the fore, and buckled on my helmet.

"Yes, to you it must seem poor." She slipped in behind me, the craft scarcely rocking with her weight.

"Lady LeFaye, I feel that I must convey your opinions to my uncle." Confusion made me stiff, formal, as if I were a stock character in a Victorian novel, badly penned by some untalented hack.  I often felt that way, in my life.

"Yes, Wesley. Please do so." One powerful stroke from her drove us into midstream. "By all means."

We paddled hard, as if trying to escape one another, even as we tried to propel the same boat,  The going was much more difficult in this direction, fighting the current, retraveling water we'd covered so easily just an hour before.

The others would be waiting. Back at the manor we would restore our masks, be formal and polite, tutor and student, mentor and protégé.

I decided that I loathed the Cotswolds. They were pretty, and deceptive.

"Don't wear yourself out," Her Ladyship told me, her voice carrying over the voice of the river. "Remember, Wesley, it's all upstream from here."


	2. Watchers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At the Watchers' Compound, Wesley and his teammates watch a tape of the Slayer who came before Buffy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _Cara Madre di Dio_ =Dear Mother of God (Italian)
> 
> The line " _All the fear has left me now/I'm not frightened anymore?"_ is from _"Fumbling Towards Ecstasy"_ by Sarah McLachlan

I limped out of the carpark and to the barrier, slipping my hand inside the device that's meant to read one's pulse and temperature, thereby ensuring that only living beings pass through the first gate.

For those unable to qualify, there's the _Aqua Saliens_ \--a high-powered water cannon, by any other name. Blair once told me he'd seen a vampire attempt to circumvent the barrier, and be drilled straight through by the jet of holy water--that is, of course, before the demon went to dust.

Whether this account is true, or merely our own version of what the Americans call an "urban folktale," I cannot be sure. Blair has a look of probity to him, but has been known to jest, upon occasion. I'll be first to admit that I am not always the best judge of such matters.

The steel doors opened before me, allowing entrance, then just as quickly shut. Despite a more-than-lingering soreness, aftermath of the previous day's Physical Trials, I chose to take this as proof that I yet lived.

Upon first rising that morning, in the overheated fussiness of my mother's fourth-best guest room, I'd considered the truth of my continued existence somewhat subject to doubt. In short, I'd felt like death warmed over--a day of soul-destroying exertion followed by one of _mater's_ formal dinners, all heavy food and desperate, aging debutantes, their biological clocks all clanging like death-knells, will do that to a man.

I shook myself into something approaching awareness. Only a few seconds were actually allowed to navigate the passage, and so I strode down the corridor to the second barrier with as good of speed as I could manage. The red lenses of the security cameras trailed my progress.

"Password," said a disembodied voice.

I rubbed my eyes. " _Homunculus_."

For God's sake, who chose these things? The second door lit with a green indicator as the human operator compared my response to that day's list, then with a second, brighter light as the computer matched my voiceprint.

Again, a door opened.

Stepping through, into an expanse of walled grounds scarcely different from those that might compose the gardens and playing fields of any exclusive public school, I immediately spied my Handler, Lady LeFaye, huddled in close conference with one of her colleagues--an older chap called Hobson, whom my Uncle Quentin had described to me as "not our sort."

That, I'd been willing to believe: Hobson had a face like a worn brown-leather suitcase, and he perpetually slouched about in the most ill-fitted, disreputable tweeds I had heretofore encountered. In addition, Hobson was a burly man, like the barman of the more rowdy sort of public house, and yet the top of his head reached only to Her Ladyship's chin. At that moment, her hand was clutched tight to his forearm, and her head bent close to his, so that she might whisper fervently in his ear.

 _Good God!_ I thought, devoutly hoping the two were only fomenting dissension, not carrying on some liaison of a more personal nature. The thought repelled.  Her Ladyship is as elegant as the most beauteous of swans, while Hobson...  well, is _Hobson_.

Not our sort, indeed.

Her Ladyship spied me as I attempted to sidle past. Her eyes, seeking mine, appeared troubled. "Wesley?"

I froze in position. "Ma'am?"

Her shapely hand rested on Hobson's lumpen cheek. "Only a moment, Peter."

She swooped down, drawing me off just as little, after casting one near-anguished look back in Hobson's direction. "We've just had word, from America," she murmured, her breath warming my ear. "His son's been killed, in the Cruciamentum."

"Dear Lord!  Is the Slayer dead?"

"I've heard nothing." She cast a second, troubled look. "I came across Peter in the carpark, drunk as a lord. God only knows how he managed to drive here. Please, Wesley..."

She wanted to ask me something, I could tell--perhaps not to carry tales to my uncle, or perhaps merely not to be an utter berk about the matter. Obviously, she thought me capable of either.

"I need to discover what's happened."

"I could walk him to the Handler's Common Room, if you like. Perhaps Mr. Tsu might be there, or Mr. Palmer."

"Yes, do, Wesley." She squeezed my shoulder. "You're a love. Peter Jr. was his only surviving son, his older boy was killed in the Falklands, and his wife's got cancer."

I stared at Hobson, who swayed in place, tears running down his seamed face to stain the frayed collar of his disreputable shirt.   It struck me suddenly:  this Watcher is also a _man_.  A man with an ill wife.  A man who has lost his only two sons.  It struck me as horrid, suddenly, and unbearable, and a sickness grew, quite uncalled for in the pit of my stomach.

"I promise you, Your Ladyship, I shall be the soul of discretion."

"Thank you, Wesley. I'd rather the others of the Council did not see him, just now."

Together, we hurried back toward the bereaved man; he gazed up at Her Ladyship with stricken eyes.

"I thought you might like a sit-down, Peter, and perhaps a cup of tea? Wyndham-Pryce is going to walk you to the Commons, in case you feel a bit unsteady."

"I need to know what's happened, Moira," he answered, his usual grumble of a voice quite broken. I did not mean to pity the man, yet could not seem to help it.

We are taught to avoid extremity of grief.  We are taught to steel ourselves.  Yet are not even Watchers, in the end, men and women?  Our hearts beat.  Our eyes form tears.

"You have every right to know, Peter," Her Ladyship answered, " _Every_ right.  And be assured, I shall discover the truth for you. Only go just now; I'll return to you soon."

She watched us depart. As we entered the Main Hall, Hobson muttered to me, "If this is another cock-up by that bastard uncle of yours, I'll kill him with my own hands, boy." More of the sort followed, as if I could be held accountable for what Uncle Quentin does or does not do. Personally, I dislike and even fear the man--and yet I'm indebted to him. Indebted to him most dreadfully.

By the time we reached the Handlers' Common Room, I was quite happy to surrender my charge to the care of quaint old Mr. Tsu.

One didn't like to think of Handlers having private lives, or families. Had unflappable, waggish Mr. Tsu a tale of hidden sorrows? Had our own Lady LeFaye?

I recalled our strange encounter on that Cotswolds riverbank three months past, the oddly elastic texture of Her Ladyship's scarred skin, and supposed that she must.

Moira, her name was. Lady Moira LeFaye? Moira, Lady LeFaye? As ever, the name made me smile--even as I winced at the early-morning stiffness of my abused muscles, remembering the savagery of yesterday's exertions. She'd left me with no doubt at all that my Handler was, in fact, an evil sorceress.

I reported to Mrs. Khatkar at the Secretary's office, and was informed that today's examinations had been postponed until after the memorial.

"Memorial?" I asked.

"Go cool your heels in the archives, Mr. Wyndham-Pryce." Over the top of her steel-rimmed spectacles, Mrs. Khatkar's caste-mark glared at me like a baleful third eye. "Surely you can accomplish something useful, hmm?"

One should know when to beard the dragon in its lair (or was that the lion in its den? I was far too weary to distinguish) and when to beat a strategic retreat. I withdrew, but when I saw that Maria del Cielo had come to the archives before me, I nearly retreated again.

Speaking of "not our sort"--even if her grandsire on the maternal side had been a Watcher, and a distinguished one at that--I could not help find del Cielo appalling, and crass.  American in all the worst ways.  Though she fluently spoke a coarse, idiomatic Italian, even her Latin remained inconceivably bad.

To my misfortune, del Cielo spotted me before I could take my leave and, worse luck still, we'd the room to ourselves. Without others present, she would feel no great compulsion toward silence.

"Hey. Windy," she greeted me, extracting a heart-shaped lolly from her mouth. The sweet had stained her lips and tongue quite red--all this while she pored over twelfth century manuscripts. It oughtn't be allowed. Actually, it wasn't allowed.

She truly was so _dreadfully_ American, whatever heritage she shared with the rest of us, as she sat there in her white singlet and black denims, in utter violation of our Standards of Dress and Comportment. I doubt very much she knows the meaning of the words.

Her father was a butcher, for God's sake, or some such thing, and she makes no attempt to hide the fact.

"What's the buzz, Wes?"

"I don't follow." I set my briefcase, carefully, on a chair, secure in the knowledge that my own dress and comportment could not be faulted. "I've only been told there's to be a memorial."

"A memorial?" She looked stricken, a great deal of the color fading from her naturally olive skin, the wild, curly hair flying about her head as if it were a particularly agitated nest of Medusa's snakes. "Was it the Cruciamentum? Who's been killed? _Cara Madre di Dio_ , not Buffy or Rupert, I hope."

I could not quell a flash of irritation. "Buffy or Rupert?" As names, especially paired together, they sounded utterly unlikely, like pair of soft toys on child's bed, a kitten and a bear, perhaps. "Who on earth are they?"

"Buffy Anne Summers, the Slayer?" She gusted out a loud breath of exasperation. "Rupert Giles, the Active Watcher? Ding ding, Wes, those names ringing any bells?"

"Bells?" Quatermass ambled in behind her, soundless as a little caramel cat. "Did you know our examinations are canceled? There's to be a memorial."

"We're up on that," del Cielo told him. "Who for?"

"For whom?" I muttered, under my breath.

"Hobson _filius_  and Blair, is my understanding." Quatermass drifted down into a chair, weightless, hardly more robust than when I'd met him, years ago, at school, when I'd been in the Fourth Form and he in the First. He'd the same look of insipid innocence that brought him the parts of Juliet and Ophelia in our school theatricals--I'd played both Romeo and Hamlet, and had cause to despise him, boy and man.

That, and he'd bested me at fencing twice the previous day. For all that he looked frail as a holy wafer, Quatermass could be quick.

"I met Her Ladyship in the corridor; she told me. Is Mr. Hobson _pater_  all right?"

"Poor man." Miss del Cielo shook her head,  could he be?"

Silence fell--but moments later she grinned, unpleasantly.

"Guess what, Simon? Our Wesley didn't know the Watcher's or the Slayer's names."

"I did," I protested. "It's only that I'm not accustomed to hearing them used so...  ah... informally. As if they were characters on _Eastenders_ , or such."

"Wesley's never even looked at the tapes," Quatermass informed her.

He was wrong about that, but I knew better than to protest. I grew up in the presence of those films. I was _made_ to watch them, when other children were watching _Thunderbirds_ or _Doctor Who._

Both Quatermass and del Cielo gazed at me, and I attempted not to squirm beneath their scrutiny.

"You really ought to, Wes. It's instructive."

"I don't see..." I began.

"Really, Wyndham-Pryce, you ought to. Truly."

Between the two of them, Quatermass and del Cielo dragged me to one of those dark little viewing chambers behind the stacks. Being American, she was quite the expert on video, raised by television, no doubt.

"Shall we start you with a tough one, Wes, just to see if you flinch?" del Cielo ran her crimson nails along a shelf of video cassettes. "Do you like horror movies?"

"Video nasties," Quatermass corrected her, every bit her accomplice.

"Oh, yeah, right." del Cielo chose a case at random. "Here's one for you, then--indexed but not labeled. We can all be surprised."

"No." I attempted to hold onto my dignity. "I don't wish to be surprised. I've no wish to view any of these films; there's no use to them whatsoever."

I knew quite well what the films contained: certain battles, certain rituals, worst of all, interviews with the Slayers. Young girls all, bright-faced or haggard, depending on the time at which they'd been captured for posterity.

Often, it had been nearly too much for me even to read of their fates. As a boy, these films had sometimes made me cry, and each time I'd been punished for my weakness.

One didn't weep for Slayers, I'd been taught. One observed, and one learned.

"No use, or too much like reality? Get your nose out of the books for five seconds, Wes, and look at the nice people." del Cielo switched off the lights; the television screen flickered.

The film itself started abruptly, the filmmaker obviously no expert in the field. I watched a young woman's lips move--at least, I thought she might be young, for though her face was unlined, her dark eyes appeared ancient. Most of her black, woolly hair looked to have been burned off. Hard angles of bone showed though taut skin that must naturally have been a lovely golden colour, but now appeared yellow with want and pain.

The sound came on so suddenly it made me start. "...too much, just too much. Thank God we got the last of the live people out this morning, as soon as the sun rose. Only fifteen of them left, holed up at the school, from a town of what used to be two thousand. The vamps just kept coming. Wave after wave. You never saw so many in one place at one time."

The young woman's entire body trembled, one long, palsied shudder. Her eyes flashed at me, out of the screen, as if she'd truly been alive and with us in the room.

"Oh, God, you bastards. You fucking _bastards_. How could you send us here? We did everything you ever told us, followed your every shitty little command." Tears began to roll down her cheeks. "We had no idea."

For a time, the camera only recorded her crying.

"Okay, okay. I can make my report. Not a proper one, the way Em would do it, beginning, middle, end. Not the way she'd write it in her journal. I'd write, but my arm hurts too much to do that anymore, and my penmanship sucks anyway--always did. Father O'Casey's helping me make this tape instead, so the next Watcher and/or Slayer will know. I apologize in advance to the good Father, for language and violent content. And to all of you Watchers, when this stops making sense. I can't hold things together very long anymore.

"I never used to talk like this; I used to be cool. I grew up in New Orleans, raised by nuns in what was euphemistically called an orphanage, went to college, almost had a life. I became a P.E. teacher--pretty funny, huh?--a good one. Things were okay. A little intense on the vampires and demons, but okay. Not until I was eight, nine years into my little nighttime career did stuff seriously start to unravel. I started to unravel--the first time Em got hurt bad, I think that's what did me in. Those nights after patrol, sitting by her bed, thinking that if she didn't wake up, I'd be all alone.

"It scared me more than anything, the idea of being alone. Still does. The thought of not having Em there, all starchy and British, correcting my grammar, brewing her horrible tea. For twelve years I've been drinking tea that puts fur on my tongue and makes my hair stand on end. For six years I've been tasting it in her mouth when she kisses me. Sorry, Father O'C, but I've got to be honest here, and I won't deny Emmy, or what she is to me. Always my Watcher. Always my friend. For six years now, my lover. It's funny, I used to whine about boys, wanting boyfriends, wanting privacy, wanting... I don't know. Things. _Other_ things.

"Now I just want everyone to know.  I was the one who started it, not Em, and I think it took us both by surprise. It was my choice, my need. She never needed anything, not that she let on. If what the Council wanted from her was to get me out on the street every night, she did that. And look, the fucking world didn't end. I never even got hurt bad, not physically. I want you guys to realize, too, that she was the only thing in this whole sad mess that you Watchers got right The guy she talks about, Merrick, who trained her--in my book he deserves a gold medal. As for the stuff in her reports--don't be a bunch of assholes. Use it. Maybe it's not tradition, but it works.

"I know I'm rambling. I know. I want to remember everything, and I'm tired, so the thoughts swim round and round. That's one of Emmy's sayings. She used to like to visit the Aquarium and watch the fish, all the tropical colors that we never saw at night. At night, all the color's neon, and that isn't the same. Where was I?

"Oh, yeah. Emmy got hurt, and I came unglued. But even after that--for a while, anyway--it still wasn't too bad. I teased Em about the way she gimped around on crutches all those months, limping along after me when I went on patrol. I'd tell her what good bait she made--and that was true, the vamps came after her like bugs to a lightbulb. Really, she could see inside my head. That's what made her do it. She always knew where I was going, even when I didn't know myself. She knew she couldn't let me go out alone anymore, the way she sometimes had after I was grown up and fully trained. It was then she first started using the magic--there are spells, you know, that can help us do this, that can bind demons, or blind them, even increase a human's strength, until she can nearly hold her own with a Slayer. At least until after the party's over.

"I used to wonder why Em just didn't use the spells on me--make me really _super_ -amazing, like... I don't know. Superman or something. That's before I figured out what magic really does--makes you use more of it, and more, while it starts ripping you out inside. That's what happened to her. And I--I just wasn't capable of maintaining my decorum any longer. That's another one of Em's phrases, in case you didn't recognize it.

"One morning we looked at ourselves, and we were like junkies, like those lost people half-dead on the streets around St. Aloysius's Children's Home, in the not-for-tourists part of The Big Easy, down in parts of the Ninth Ward, back when I was a kid. We were existing like vampires. We'd given up our jobs and started living on Em's family money, which for years she'd said she would never do. We'd sleep most of the day, then as soon as it was dark go out hunting, looking to kill--call it Slaying if you like, but we were just like them, the enemy. The only difference was, we still had pulses.

"That's when Em called you guys. I remember standing in the phone booth one night, pressed up against her, shaking, while she fed quarter after quarter into the slot, enough to reach England. Junkie that I was, I needed to go out there, into the dark, and she wasn't going to leave me alone. I was cussing and muttering things, like some kind of nutcase, and she was trying to put on her Watcher voice, so the Council wouldn't know she'd gone nearly as crazy as me. I don't know who she talked to--Travers, I guess. He never liked her--I think he'd figured out that Em helped me fudge that Cruciamentum thing, which was his baby, and afterwards he never forgave her, 'cause he couldn't prove it, and the Council wouldn't let him take her away from me.

"Whoever it was, she told him it was time to let us stop. She even told him how to swing it--that she could kill me and bring me back, just like Snow White, just the way we'd discussed. Stop my heart for a second so the next one could be called, bring me back--wake me up, her princess, with a kiss--so that we could just be. We would still help the great cause, make ourselves useful back in England. Em had everything worked out perfectly. She even offered to put it in writing. I don't know what the guy--Travers, I'm picturing Travers--said to her, but Em just out and out lost it, and started screaming at him in Cornish. That's a completely dead language, in case you didn't know. Deader than Latin. I was pushing up against her, squeezing her arm, digging my nails into her skin, trying to get her to pull it together enough to talk English again. I knew we wouldn't get anything if she didn't speak English.

"'Nine years,' she yelled at him, 'Is bloody long enough!' She screamed a whole bunch of bad words, and then she started to cry. The guy at the other end said a lot of words of his own to her, while Em was weeping but not making any sound, and at the end she just hung up. "That's it?" I asked. Em shook her head. "No, love. No. They're sending us to Budapest." She wiped her eyes with her sleeve; she didn't wear makeup anymore, so nothing smeared. After that, I never heard her Watcher-voice again.

"Later on, I found out the guy had told her that she could retire and come home, but not me. Never me. Budapest nearly finished us. We went all the way crazy there, so bad it disgusted even the vampires. I can still remember that blonde one, Spike, staring down at me, right after he'd run one of those huge railroad nails of his through Em's guts, and saying, 'Ducks, you need to get yourself some help. Bloody 'ell, look at you!'"

The young woman on the tape began to laugh; I could see the vampire's point. She appeared no more than half sane, and quite like a habitual user of drugs.

"The next Slayer, my poor little heiress--I wonder who she'll be?" the woman said at last, when she had contained her laughter. "One of those sad, dumb kids brought up by the Council since she was in diapers, trained to walk and talk and think like you? That kind never lasts. Two months, six months, a year--they're gone, time to pull out the next ticket in the Slayer lottery. Or maybe someone like me, who almost got a taste of quasi-normal life? Who will you send out to her--some dickless wonder like the first Watcher you gave me, Mr. Oliphant? 'You will obey orders, young lady'--he actually said that to me, and made this dumb little hand-signal of crossed fingers over his breastbone, like he was in the fucking Boy Scouts.

"Maybe my successor will get lucky, and you'll send her a cool Watcher, like Emmy. Maybe you'll send Rupert, who took care of me while Em was in the hospital in Budapest, and then in London, too. During that month, before you bastards made us come back out again, we holed up in his apartment, and slept in his bed while he slept on the couch--but he always acted like he didn't mind that, even if he did.

"Em trained with Rupert under Mr. Merrick, who was their Handler--but you know that. You probably know everything I say. Emmy used to have a photo of the three of them together, until our weird old apartment building burned down. Mr. Merrick was an older guy, but elegant, and Em and Rupert were younger, about the age I am now. A nice-looking couple, as English as crumpets and Earl Grey tea. I get a little jealous of Rupert sometimes, which is pretty stupid, since I know Em left him to come to me. I don't even know if they were in love, ever. Em doesn't kiss and tell, but from the way she talks, let's say probably. All I know is that, aside from the jealousy, and the holes in my brain where I used to have memories, I miss him, and I miss London. We were nearly like a family there.

"Sometimes, when Em was hurting too badly to be touched, Rupert would hold me tight in his arms so I could sleep--tight but nice, nothing weird, just the way I always imagined a dad would hold me, if I'd ever had one. Rupert smelled good, and his arms, when he held me, were very strong and comforting. I know I'm not a kid, haven't been in forever, but I always wanted a dad.

"We talked about it last night, Emmy and me, before the bad thing happened. She really thought you should send him. You know, for the new girl--she wanted to tell you that, even though she didn't think you'd listen. She said he's the kind of Watcher who'd take care of his Slayer, and stick with her to the bitter end, the way Emmy's stuck with me. I know that's true because of the way he took care of us. He could convince me to do things--like get out of bed, and wash, and have breakfast--when I really just wanted to die. I didn't want to eat, but somehow he made me. The one thing Rupert ever did wrong was this: he'd make me tea, but it was never strong enough. I told him it had to be strong enough, so I'd know it was real.

"Sometimes I think nothing's real. Sometimes I think this is hell, because nothing real could hurt this much, and go on and on this way.

"I hope if by some chance Em pulls through this, Rupert comes to find her here in Maine, the way I asked. It's my last wish, and I wrote it in a letter, even though the writing hurt like a hot knife through my arm. I sent the letter with the schoolteacher, on the bus out of town. Sally--I'm going to call her Sally, 'cause I really can't remember the teacher's right name--said the words made sense. I had her read it, because I wasn't sure. I used to be able to put words together, one after the other, like a string of matched pearls. I want Rupert to get the letter. I want Emmy to see him again. I want him to hold her so tight it almost hurts, with her cheek pressed up about those scratchy clothes he wears, and have him talk to her softly, the way he talked to me, until he almost pulled me back into the light. I can say this because I like to think of my Emmy happy, since any bit of happiness I managed to snatch out of the past twelve years--well, that happiness came from her.

"This is what it boils down to: I love my Watcher, plain and simple, so _In Memoriam_ I'm going to try to do this right. This tape is the first bit, the--how did Em put it in the old days?--the ' _saving the information for posterity_ ' part. Weird, but it's harder than the rest. It's so hard to keep making sense: it's been a long time since I had to try, since I didn't have Emmy to think for me. Funny, there was a time when I thought up the strategies.

"I'll do this thing right, then the next thing, too, and that's all she wrote. How does that song I like start? ' _All the fear has left me now/I'm not frightened anymore?_ ' It has. It really has. And I'm not. The woman I used to be is starting to wake up, just for a little while, before we both go back to sleep.

"This is how the last chapter starts, and how the story ends: we're in Pottersville, up north on the coast of Maine. The lifeblood of this town used to be a fish processing plant. Lobsters, Atlantic cod. Big old freezers--that's where the vampires sleep. Turn off the juice, a freezer makes a nice warm cave to wait out the daylight. Not too many windows in the whole factory, really, just little slits, high up. It's a huge, dark concrete box, the best vampire hotel you could think of. Six months ago we might have done some good here, might have been able to take back the town. Now it's just too late.

"Yesterday we wired the factory to explode, and Em did a Spell of Obscurement to hide the charges--afterward, she was bleeding a little, from the corner of her mouth, but she shrugged that off. She told me then that she'd set the spell up so that it would still hold, even if something happened to her--as if she knew. I'm still scared it won't work, that everything's going to go to hell in a handbasket. You know they don't sleep really, the vampires. Not really. Not the way you think, though they do get pretty groggy toward noon. That's the time to go in. I know it won't work if we do it by remote. One of us has to be there, and stay alive long enough to blow everything sky high. What am I saying, one of us? It's gonna be me."

The Slayer rubbed her shoulder, absently--her upper arm had been splinted, I noticed, with what appeared to be a magazine and a pair of shoelaces.

"What else? Oh, that's right. Last night. We stole bows from the sporting goods store--there wasn't anyone left to stop us--and had Father O'Casey bless vat after vat of water. Poor man, he nearly freaked when Em started doing her thing--the Wards, and the flaming wall, all that stuff. His first exposure, I think, to the Black Arts. She looked different, too, more herself, really every bit the witch, the sorceress. I think it's true that her way-back ancestors used to be queens. I could see that clear as day, in her face, and the way she carried her body: she didn't look like a Watcher at all." The young woman gave a slight smile. "I can remember those suits she used to wear, proper enough to have tea with Her Majesty, and how long it lasted before she shed that skin.

"I remember how it used to scare us that we couldn't sleep alone anymore, not even in daytime. Now it doesn't even seem strange that we can't sleep at all. Or I can't. I don't think Em's ever going to wake up again. I think maybe she lost too much blood, and the magic's drained too much of something else. The one that got her was the biggest vamp I'd ever seen, and he nearly ripped out her throat. We bandaged it the best we could, but I don't know." She looked down at something, the camera following her movements. A woman's head lay on the Slayer's lap; the woman's chest scarcely moved. "It happened when she tried to save me. She'd done all these spells, six, seven of them, maybe more, so many she was nearly at the point of meltdown.

"We'd climbed up into the belltower, with as much holy water as we could carry, and all the ammo we could find. Father O'Casey and one of the schoolteachers, the young teacher who didn't get turned--that's Sally, the one I mentioned before--manned the crossbows. Em and I had our longbows, and a whole forest of wooden arrows. It was like fucking Agincourt--' _Cry God for Harry, England and St. George!_ ' That's what Em said, ironically. It's Shakespeare. For a little while I thought it was going to be okay, and then, from all the magic, Em started bleeding, at the nose and the ears. I looked at her, and I couldn't look away, and one of them on the ground clipped me with something. I came flying out, right through the open window. Em didn't stop to think, she dived right after. My arm broke when I hit ground, and I got the wind knocked out of me, but I could see the first light of dawn.

"Em stood over me, bleeding, but fighting just like one of us, like a Slayer, until I got my breath back. That's when the big vamp grabbed her. When I was fighting one of them in front, he caught her from behind, and by the time I turned around to stake him, it was all too late. He'd dragged her back into the shadows, and fed on her--I still don't know if he forced her to drink in turn. It didn't matter that the sun was coming up, and the rest of them had to run. It was too late.

"Father O'Casey helped me carry her inside. He splinted up my arm, and he did most of Em's bandages. He was a medic in the war.  Some war.  I don't know which. Together we put everyone on the schoolbus, and told the schoolteacher to drive--hard and fast and don't look back, not for anything. Funny, I still can't remember that woman's name, but she was braver than she ever knew she could be, one of the good ones. Maybe it wasn't Sally. It might have been Sarah or Samantha. Something like that.

"Father O'Casey promised to stay here with Em until it's done, and then take her for help. I believe him. He's a good guy. I left him a stake and told him what to do, just in case. Em wouldn't want to rise as one of them, not ever. Father O'Casey did the Last Rites for her, even though she's not Catholic, and he heard my confession, and absolved me. There were things I confessed to him that I don't think were sins, like all the stuff between Em and me, but I told them anyway, and I think he understood. It's not even like we had any choice; all we had was each other. Funny, I never had much use for priests when I was a kid--the children at my orphanage weren't really orphans, and I remember one of the Fathers calling us, "the poisoned fruit of deadly sin," as if we had any choice about the way we got born. I'm kind of glad, though, at the end, that I met one who changed my mind. Father O'Casey says it isn't suicide if you die in war. That's what this is.

"I'm going to have him shut off the camera now, and I'll lie down beside Em just for a few minutes. I want to hold her in my arms one last time, and say goodbye. Then I'll go. I hope what the good Father says is true, and we'll see each other in another place. I'm trying really hard not to tell all you tweedy bastards, safe at home in Mother England, to go straight to Hell. Em and I were two decent people, and we fought the good fight. We deserved better than this at the end. That's all."

 

The screen dissolved to dirty snow. I turned about to see Her Ladyship standing just behind my chair, her eyes glazed and one hand pressed to her throat, above the hidden place where unseen scars marred her skin.

"That tape oughtn't be in general archive," she said quietly, holding out the other hand. "Maria, will you give it me, please?"

Del Cielo threw our Handler a look, but complied, although I could clearly read an official catalogue number on the tape's jacket.

"Your examinations have been canceled for the day. I've come to tell you that the memorial for Mr. Blair and Mr. Hobson _filius_ will be held in half an hour. Please do be punctual. Maria, I'd appreciate your finding something appropriate to wear. And, please do not force me to measure your skirt to determine if the length is acceptable. Remember: sober dress reflects respect for our fallen comrades."

"Yes'm," del Cielo answered, unusually subdued.

"Very well, then. Dismissed."

"Your Ladyship..." Quatermass seemed determined to linger. Weak as ever, he'd tears in his eyes. I can't imagine why they've promoted him so far--Handler's Pet, I suppose.

"Later, Simon." She sank into the seat del Cielo had lately vacated, turning the video round and round in her hands.

Rising, I glanced at the others' departing backs, then said, "You actually intend to remove an officially catalogued tape from the archives?"

"Bloody hell, Wesley, why should you care?" Her accent had shifted from its normally crystalline tones, into something a bit furry round the edges, softer in its vowels and consonants, with a hint of the sing-song quality one associates with the Irish or the Welsh.

"Because our task is not to suppress knowledge, but to use it--to learn from it, if one may state the obvious."

"Your task is, apparently, to be an officious little prick. Do you know what the others call you, behind your back? Uncle Quentie's lapdog. Grow some bollocks, Wesley. Learn to be your own man."

"I know that these people are not my friends."

"Then you ought to be at pains to make them so. Sit down," Her Ladyship ordered, pushing a chair toward me with her foot.

"I ought to..."

"You're already appropriately dressed. You're quite the most appropriately dressed young man I know. Please sit."

I sat, displaying good posture and an attentive manner, hands folded in my lap.

"I'm sorry for what I said to you, Wesley, a moment ago. For what I called you. That wasn't called for."

"But, perhaps, true."

 Her Ladyship gave a feline smile. "If you say so, Wesley. And in answer to your first question: no, I don't intend to scarper with the video, merely to have the Archivist change its cataloguing from General Files to Special Request. That's all. Not much of what the Slayer taped is usable."

"But as an example of Slayer psychology..."

"I suppose, but perhaps we should protect her memory, poor girl, from those that would not understand?"

"And her Watcher's? What's described on that tape is a shocking disregard for nearly all of our tenets. The woman must have been mad."

"Oh, she was. Quite. And, Wesley, when you've kept a Slayer alive for twelve years in the field, please feel welcome to come back and criticize her to me." Lady LeFaye rose, limping a bit on one leg. "The weather's turning, I think. Perhaps we'll have more snow."

"Perhaps," I answered, pleased to take refuge in generalities. There was something, I knew, that I'd missed. Something obvious.

"Families can be bloody," Her Ladyship said at last, quite unexpectedly. She constantly caught me off guard in just such a manner.

"I... er... yes, I suppose."

"And your Uncle Quentin seems determined to steer your course for you. Pity you can't emulate Buffy--she had no trouble making her feelings toward him known."

"Which were?"

"She told your uncle, ' _Bite me._ '"

I laughed, couldn't help myself, even though I was shocked at the very thought. "Might as well sign my death warrant."

"Did you never want to be anything but a Watcher, Wesley? Anything at all?"

"I briefly entertained thoughts of becoming Indiana Jones, but I couldn't abide the rats and the snakes. Very insanitary. So no, Uncle Quentin aside, it's what I've wanted, always."

"You have a sense of humour. I never knew that." Her Ladyship regarded me, smiling. "You came through the Physical Trials swimmingly. I've certified you in five weapons instead of three, though you'll never make a fencer, I fear."

"Quatermass bested me. Twice."

"Simon's not strong, but he fights with his head. I wish you wouldn't think so little of him, Wesley--he's sensitive, but there's a good strong core. He thinks well of you."

"Yet he sided with del Cielo today."

"They are bosom friends, and both possess passionate hearts.  You take everything so personally. Were you teased a great deal as a child?" She regarded me. "Yes, I see you were. Forget I said that to you. You truly went all out, did well, and you should be proud. Are you hurting today?"

"No," I lied to her, "I'm not hurting in the least."

"Well, then," she replied, something showing in her eyes that, after three years, I still could not read. "Neither am I, Wesley."


	3. All of That, and More

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A moody little piece abour Moira, Giles, and their relationship past and future, set shortly after the Slayer Helena's story in Watchers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah, 1996! A year in which you could actually walk your loved one to their departure gate, and meet them when they returned!

_February, 1996_

At Heathrow, Giles shook Merrick's hand a final time, parting from the old man in a mutual silence born from equal parts British reserve and the certain knowledge of all their futures must hold.

No goodbyes remained to be said. In truth, all the words that ought to have been spoken, or were capable of being expressed, had passed between them the night before.

They'd referred to their meeting as a birthday party, but it hadn't been a party, or even a celebration, really--two bachelors together in a dimly lighted London flat, a bottle of good single-malt scotch, of which they'd mutually drunk far too much. Shared memories, also, of which there'd been more than a surfeit.

Before Merrick's excellent whiskey had even begun to take its toll, Giles had wondered vaguely how he'd come to this state of existence: no wife, no family, sharing the forty-second anniversary of his birth with the man who'd begun as his strictest critic and ended as his teacher--his mentor, even, one might say and, without a doubt, his friend.

Yes, one certainly might say. Giles breathed slowly, carefully, fighting melancholy as he watched the grand old lion make his descent toward the aircraft that would shortly bear him away. Merrick seemed diminished somehow, despite his height, a fragile, tweed-clad shape lost within the great grey maw of the ramp.

 _You bloody fool_ , Giles chided himself, _If you'd not drunk so much last night, you'd be the better for it this morning._

Merrick might have told him the same thing, had he not gone away. To America. To...

"Bugger this," the ghost of Ripper said within him, but Ripper had been gone too long for Giles to let him have a voice now. He would conquer this aching sadness as a Watcher must. He would act as he was meant to act, just as Merrick had taught him, discovering in himself the strength to remember his mentor with fondness, with appreciation for the man's intellect and courage. He must see this as an act of meaning, the culmination of a life's work.

" _Bollocks_ ," the voice of Ripper informed him, with a sneer.

Giles removed his glasses, rubbing his fingers over his eyes hard enough to make his vision blur for some seconds after.

 _"Shut up,"_ he told Ripper, even though no such person existed, or would ever exist again. _"You're not wanted.  You will never be wanted again."_

Giles could miss Merrick, that was allowed. Anyone who'd truly known the man would miss him.

Not that many could, or would, claim such a distinction. Truly, Merrick was one of the odder men Giles had ever known, quite a statement given both his own profession and his vocation: neither archeologists nor Watchers generally could be called the most ordinary of beings. Not to so much as mention the rare birds who flitted through the back corridors of the British Museum, for five years now his home-from-home. His ears echoed constantly with their cries of " _Mr. Giles, sir--utter disaster_!" or " _Dr. Giles, it's that damn cat again_!"

Giles turned his back to the departure gate, refusing to watch any longer, moving with soundless haste down Heathrow's dully-coloured corridors as he attempted to ignore the wave of prescience that shook through his body. Yes, Merrick was gone. He would not see the old man again, and just now he'd a flight of his own to catch, one that might well carry him into an equal--or even greater--darkness.

Giles knew that his mentor wasn't sorry to return home--Merrick had been born in the state of California, up north, amidst mile upon mile of grape vines and mustard plants. He'd spoken of his boyhood, watching eagles soar over the vineyards, and of driving southward, into drier lands that bordered on the ocean. In all his travels, Giles had never seen the Pacific Ocean, had difficulty even imagining its turbulent blue-gray waters, bordering on beaches of yellow sand.

Maine, his own destination, was another foreign land to him. Expect snow, he'd been cautioned, and unimaginably bitter cold--the February temperature in London, which now seemed close to bone-chilling, would be mild by comparison. Giles rather suspected that nothing in his hastily-packed suitcase would be sufficient to keep him warm, yet somehow didn't care.

Poor Helena's letter seemed to burn in his jacket pocket.

Giles kept having to touch the fabric that concealed her brief missive, not for reassurance, but almost as if he hoped the soft, smudged paper would have somehow disappeared, that its words would not be real, though he knew they must be: Helena was dead. Another had been called.

Another had been called. Another young girl, only fourteen years old, a year younger, even, than the same age Helena had been when Moira went to her, the same age he and Moira had been when first they met.

 

He well remembered the day, twelve years past, when the news reached him through the rumour mill, and how he'd gone to Merrick's study, demanding to know, could it possibly be true, and why, if it was, had Moira been chosen over him? If he was too young to be an active Watcher, why wasn't _she_?

Merrick, he recalled, had sent him away, and he'd gone out angrily to stalk about the grounds of the Watchers' Compound until he reached the running track.

Moira was there, as he'd know she would, in fact _must_  be, running her damned hurdles, round and round--stride, tuck, fly.

As always, it pleased Giles to watch her. Yes, even now, eight years past her Olympic triumphs, he loved the flash of her long legs as she ran, the perfect grace of her form, the concentration and drive she brought to everything she did: her studies, her spells, making love. Even living in squalor, their early days in London, she'd reminded him of Bast, the cat-goddess of ancient Egypt: feline, unknowable, worthy of worship. And worship her he had, with his body, his adoration.

"Em," he'd called softly, as Moira came off the track. She'd glanced up, her green eyes even stranger than his own.

"Oberon and Titania," Merrick called them, perhaps for their unusual looks, or their quarrelsome, mercurial ways, for their mutual, continuous flouting of tradition, the way they drew and repelled each other, like the moon and the sea.

Standing at the edge of the track in her unitard and trainers, Moira had continued to gaze at him, and Giles realized she'd been weeping, that she trembled as if with some terrible chill. Moira never wept; only once before had he seen her tears.

It seemed the most natural thing in the world to take her in his arms, her sweat-drenched body pressed against his, to kiss her with passion and feel the burning, fervent pressure of her lips and tongue. They had gone back to his rooms and made what might have been called love, but was in fact a wordless coupling of loss and desperation. They'd come together, violently, and both cried out in anguish at their mutual release.

When she'd gone, Giles actually thought he would never see her again, and though they had spoken often, by telephone, those conversations never seemed quite real. By the end, her voice had been a stranger's, the familiar Oxford accent in tatters, her sentences disjointed and nonsensical. Then, Giles had spoken to her gently, talking of his life, his work, of normal, prosaic things. She'd no longer needed anything else from him, only to hear his voice.

Budapest had been hellish, the month with the two women in his flat nearly as terrible. Moira had at first been horribly ill, unfailing in her tenderness toward her Slayer, yet in so much physical pain she could not bear to be touched, could hardly find the control to speak. Then there had been Helena: her restless peregrinations, the way she would alternate stony silences with bouts of unceasing babble. She would go out Slaying with perfect, animal instinct, but had to be coaxed into every small act of ordinary life--into sleeping, washing, swallowing even small amounts of food--each victory such a struggle that, at the end, the cumulative attempts all but wore him out. Night after night he'd sat up on the sofa, holding her tight in his arms, and tighter, until at last her head dropped to his shoulder, and she subsided into troubled sleep. His life had become an unending sequence of frustration, regret, pain, and yet, perhaps through his care for her, Giles had come to love the young woman, as he'd always loved her mentor.  As if, somehow, she was a child they'd made together, yet one utterly unlike their bright and sunny-natured son.

When word came at last from the Council that they must leave London once more, bound for a place he heard of only as "Pottersville," he remembered the two clinging to one another, and Helena's tears. "This is the end," she'd sobbed, "This is the end." And Moira stroked her hair, saying, "Yes, love, but it isn't so bad. Courage, my dearest, courage."

Giles had torn himself away from them and raged his way into the Watchers' Compound, demanding of the Council that they must, at last, let the women go.

Like robed judges, the Seven had gazed down from their high seats in the Council Chamber, answering gently, indulgently, "The two are Slayer and Watcher, what else should they do? Are we to be without a Slayer?" He reminded them of Moira's suggestion, of the way she'd theorized that a new Slayer might be called without the loss of the old. The Seven smiled again, and reminded him of their traditions, the way things were done--the sublime beauty of a Slayer sacrificing herself to save others.

Moira and Helena had vanished between one hour and the next, and Giles never knew where they'd gone to--despite all his entreaties, the Council would not say where on earth Pottersville lay--until the tattered letter arrived at the museum, penned in the Slayer's painful, childish scrawl: " _Please, Rupert,_ " she'd written. " _Come here, for our Emmy. I'm probably dead now. We've killed them all in Pottersville. It's in Maine. Ask for Father Seamus O'Casey. He'll know. Love, Lena_." Followed by a series of X's and O's. Hugs and kisses.  For him.

Helena's letter arrived the day of his birthday, part of a neat stack of mail already slit open by his secretary, Elspeth. She'd returned to his office an hour later, expecting dictation, only to find him staring at the smudged envelope, tears in his eyes. "Sir?" she'd said softly, but Giles couldn't answer, couldn't think how to explain. She'd sat across from him, touching the hand that held the letter, and he'd used the other hand to cover his face, not wanting her to see him weep.

"Bad news, sir?" she asked at last, but Giles couldn't think how to respond. She was kind, and he could tell her nothing of his life, and so he had muttered something about a death in the family, and gone to the director's office to arrange a leave of absence. That accomplished, he'd called Merrick, who'd news of his own--Giles was meant to go to California, the new Slayer had been discovered there.

"I've just had a letter from Helena Penglis," Giles had answered, and read the little note aloud.

"What's happened to your training, Giles?" the old man responded, but his voice was kind, and he'd stepped in with the Council, taken the burden of the call upon himself--and somehow either made the old, grey men believe the situation in Maine warranted further investigation, or called in favours from some part of their number whose bodies yet contained vestigal hearts.

So much said, here Giles found himself, flying London to New York, New York to Bangor, unable to imagine the frail, tense woman Moira had become without her Slayer by her side. Unable to imagine what, if anything, he should say to her. That this journey had been Helena's dying wish must be enough.

Numbly, he boarded his flight, numbly found his seat, fitting his long legs into the cramped space and not noticing the discomfort. He'd brought a paperback of Dickens's _Our Mutual Friend_ , a book someone he'd loved once recommended as her favourite, but although the novel remained open on his lap, and he read, Giles could make no sense of the words.

"Business or pleasure?" the man beside him asked: jolly, corpulent, like the American Santa Claus sans beard.

"I beg your pardon?" Giles answered softly.

"Are you goin' to the Big Apple for business or pleasure?" the man repeated, patiently, with no slacking of his obvious good humour.

Giles turned upon the hapless American a look so grey and haunted, he could see the shadow of it fall across the poor man's face. "Business," he said, after a pause. "Yes, business."

When it became clear that the flight would not entirely fill, the man moved away to another seat.

Giles stared out the window during takeoff, though he disliked flying, and actually preferred to ignore the details. Odd, that--he'd wanted very much, as a boy, to be a pilot, to control one of the fighter planes that streaked across the skies above his Salisbury home, launched from the nearby American airbase. He'd imagined himself in uniform, tall and commanding, skilled in all things aeronautical. Perhaps he hated these commercial jets because, inside them, he was helpless. Since Eyghon, he'd hated for anything to lie outside his control.

"But you can't control everything, Rupert. You can control nothing, really. You have to accept that it's so." Eva had said those words to him, long before she'd moved out of their flat--that defection occurring the night of Moira and Helena's return. Eva had been red-haired, sweet as cherries, a little plump, warm and soft to cuddle up to on a December night. He'd dared to give her a ring at Christmas, and she'd been so happy, shining with her joy.

Two days later he'd flown to Budapest, and two weeks later, Eva was gone, the ring left behind on the dining table, along with everything else they'd shared. Her glowering brothers, big narrow-eyed Norwegians, had come for the rest. Eva had a gift--she touched things, and she knew. She'd touched him, and she should have known: what he was, and what he would be. That his life belonged to another woman, one he had not yet met. Perhaps her natural sweetness had forced poor Eva into false hope. She'd touched Moira's hand, and been sick, and run away. She wouldn't let him near her.

Now here it was, bleak midwinter--what had C.S. Lewis written? " _Always winter and never Christmas?_ " Christmas seemed, in fact, a million years away, as if it had never been--as if his three jolly little aunts and a handful of friends from the museum had never come round for the roast goose and plum pudding Eva had been so proud of getting right. As if she had never sat on his lap after opening her present and hugged him so tight his ribs creaked, whilst their friends laughed and smiled--as if the two of them hadn't made sweet slow languorous love on the hearthrug after the others had gone, Eva still wearing the green paper crown from her Christmas cracker. One of his perfect, happy days, lost and never to come again.

 _Forget this, old man_ , Giles ordered himself, put his head back and shut his eyes.

Almost before he knew it, the pilot announced their approach to New York. The Americans scrambled with their customs paperwork, then they were on the ground, and he hurried toward the next leg of his flight, through a vast, seething, anonymous crowd.

The airport in Bangor seemed tiny and deserted by comparison with that in New York. He saw no identifiable foreigners, few faces that weren't white, and a great many people bundled up like Inuit in their thick outerwear, which only added to his fears about the insufficiency of his own clothing. Already, Giles felt chilled, and though his training had taught him how to limit the effects of cold or heat, a vast chasm of difference lay between the chill of a November night in England, and the lethal cold of a winter's day in Maine. Shivering, he sought out the rental agency, and requested the four-wheel-drive vehicle he'd reserved for his stay.

The trim, dark-haired agency clerk glanced at this wool topcoat and modest luggage. "Either you're a better packer than I am, or you'd better stop somewhere and get yourself some real cold-weather gear. I'm serious. We don't like visitors to freeze to death in our fair State, and five minutes outside will turn you into an icicle, even with the heat cranked up full blast. The cold snap we're in right now is even killing natives."

"Thank you," Giles lied. "I shall be glad to take your advice."

"You're English, right?" Displaying amazing speed, she entered his information into her computer, then tore off the resulting printout with practiced ease. "Okay, here's what we have." She pointed out the features of his vehicle, including the tire chains in the boot. "You have put on chains before, right?" she asked him doubtfully.

Giles glanced at her name-badge, gazed into her ice-blue eyes and assured her that, _Yes, Ms. LeClare, he had indeed._

"You should have come to see us in June. Or July. It's nice here then."

"I've a friend ill, in hospital. I've come to bring her home."

"I'm sorry." Her eyes flashed. "Girlfriend, huh?"

"Something like that." Giles wondered why the young woman looked disappointed. "Can you tell me how to find the offices of the Catholic Archdiocese?"

Ms. LeClare laughed. "Well that's a new one! Most guys just ask me if I know the name of a good bar, or how to get to the ice hockey arena."

"I'm a little different."

That statement earned him another laugh. "Yeah, I can tell." She pulled out a yellow marking-pen and drew out the route on a city map. "It's actually kind of a funny question, because my mom works there." For a moment, she nibbled the end of her pen. "Look, if I'm not being nosy, what did you want from them? If it's just info, mom could give it to me over the phone, and spare you a trip. If you're looking for spiritual comfort, though, I can't help you there."

"It is information, actually. I'm trying to locate a priest. A Father Seamus O'Casey, formerly posted to a town called Pottersville?"

"No prob." She dialed the telephone with the same rapidity she'd displayed on her computer keyboard. "Mama! Comment ça va?  Good. No, I don't think you can say that to him. Why? Because you'd burn in hell for all eternity, that's why."

Giles attempted to suppress a smile, and Ms. LeClare winked at him.

"Look," she said, "I have a customer here who desperately needs to locate a priest. No, Ma, a particular priest. Father Seamus O'Casey, from up Pottersville? Uh-huh. No shi... kidding. Really? Can you grab him?" She put her hand over the mouthpiece. "Mom's grabbing him for you."

"He's actually there?" Giles felt stunned, as he often did by the unexpected.

"Oh, hi," Ms. LeClare continued. "Umn, Rupert Giles. Tall, English, très, très beau. 'Fraid not--trying to find his girlfriend. Okay, thanks a whole bunch, Mama. Bye now, see you tomorrow at Remy's. Yes, you do. Bye!"

She hung up the phone. "I guess you need my map after all."

"Thank you." Once more, Giles looked down into her eyes. "That was extremely kind."

"What, like you don't have girls doing stuff for you all the time?"

Giles blushed a little. "Ah--actually, no."

"That's so cute!" she told him, and laughed a final time, putting the map, keys and rental agreement into his hand. "Good luck, Mr. Giles. Drive carefully, and remember to dress warm."

"Thank you again, Ms. LeClare. I shall."

He stepped out onto the concourse, looking for the shuttle that would convey him to his vehicle. By the time it arrived, less than a minute later, he'd already begun to shiver uncontrollably.

"You're not dressed for this, buddy," the driver said.

"So I am becoming aware." At the lot the shuttle lingered, the driver making sure Giles's vehicle would actually start in such extreme weather. Fortunately, it did, and Giles let it run for a few minutes, studying the map, committing the route to memory. He'd a fair ability to convert written or drawn instructions to reality, and thought he could find his way with little difficulty. He only wished Ms. LeClare had not been correct, and that the Jeep's heater would do something to ameliorate the bone-aching cold.

Giles drove carefully and a little slowly, accustoming himself to both the weather and the disorienting sense of driving on the wrong side of the road. As he'd expected he found the Archdiocese with little effort, parked and hurried to the reception area. Inside, he found a trim, older woman with salt-and-pepper hair, quite obviously, by her looks, the mother of his own Ms. LeClare.

"Mr. Giles?" she said quietly. "Father O'Casey's in the Ladychapel. I'll take you there."

He followed her neat, straight-backed figure out through an unmarked door, down corridors and into the much larger space of the cathedral. In one of the side chapels a smallish man knelt before a figure of the Virgin. Giles waited silently until the priest crossed himself, and rose. Seeming to sense the Watcher's presence at once, he turned.

"Father O'Casey?" Giles asked quietly.

"Mr. Giles." It wasn't a question. The priest was a spare, neat man, native Irish, perhaps ten years older than Giles himself. His brown eyes looked weary and haunted. He didn't offer to shake hands.

"Is..." Giles began. "Did..."

The older man regarded him, then said with sudden violence. "You lot should have brought them home. By God, how do you sleep at night?"

"I don't," Giles admitted. "Not often." He slipped into one of the pews, facing the crucifix. For the better part of his life he'd carried crosses or crucifixes wherever he went, day or night. He believed in the existence of evil--had seen its presence demonstrated time and again--and yet he'd never, since his youth, felt the love of God, wasn't even sure that God existed, did not, in fact, know what made holy water holy.

Once, he remembered, he'd put that question to Moira, wondering how, with her very different beliefs, she should answer him.

"Em, how _do_ they make holy water holy?"

With a laugh, she'd told him, "Rupert, they just boil the the hell out of it."

Some moments had passed before he'd recognized what she'd said as a joke.

Giles couldn't remember, now, how many years had passed since they'd spoken to one another with their old ease and humour. Neither could he believe that they might ever do so again.

"You are a man without faith." The priest lowered himself, carefully, into the pew beside Giles. He looked as if his back hurt him, and perhaps it did--certainly it did, if the priest had been required to move Moira, dead or alive, any great distance--she was close on six feet tall and, for a woman, muscular with it, despite her sleekness.

"Without faith in God, or in yourself," Father O'Casey continued, as Giles's mind wandered, although the priest's words came to him clearly and sharply enough to wound. "Without faith in your calling, or in those for whom you work. Without the courage of your convictions to stand up against human wrong and say 'no, this must not be.'"

Giles folded his hands and leaned against the pew in front of him, feeling tears leak into the woven nest of his fingers. All the priest said was true, and more besides: he'd lost his faith, his sweet, whole-hearted boyhood belief, the night his father and Augustina died, the night of beautiful Augustina's Cruciamentum, and never got it back again. He'd known violence and hatred, had committed criminal acts and summoned demons. He often felt hatred and disgust for himself, and yet couldn't believe, utterly, that he was a bad man. He'd been innocent, even good, as a boy, and for this second half of his life had attempted to act with courage, integrity, honour. He'd a scholar's passion for knowledge and a hatred of ignorance, had tried to be a good friend to those few he called his friends, and had never, in that time, taken a woman except in the deepest affection--even Eva, who'd left him in anger, could not actually fault his behavior toward her, only that his calling, in the end, had stood before their love.

"For God's sake," Giles said, still weeping, in a broken voice he didn't recognize as his own. "Only tell me if she's alive."

For many minutes, the priest remained silent, then at last said, "Come with me."

He led Giles through a warren of corridors, through doors and up steep flights of stairs, until at last they stood in a bright white room beneath the eaves of quite another building. Stark wintry light shone down from a round window overhead, and a radiator bubbled and hissed against one wall. He wondered if this was some sort of nun's cell, the wooden floor uncarpeted, its only furniture a chair, a _prie-dieu_ , a plain, narrow bed with pale blue blankets. A crucifix hung on the wall above the bedhead, its Christus looking particularly tortured.

Glancing down from the tormented figure, Giles saw Moira sleeping, the butchered remnants of her glorious auburn hair in elf-locks on the pillow, her fair skin so pale it seemed luminous, whiter than the linens. She appeared younger than he had ever seen her look, and that illusion of youth made him believe something he had never believed before--that she might once, actually, have been a child.

A ring of pale bandage surrounded Moira's throat. But she breathed. At least she breathed. The snowy sheets rose lightly over her chest.

Giles went to his knees beside her, hand hovering over her cheek, her breast, her shoulder, not daring to touch. Again, he found himself weeping.

"You should never have let them go," the priest repeated.

"I didn't intend to," Giles answered, his voice no less broken than it had been inside the church. "They slipped out while I pleaded to our masters for their lives, and I didn't know where to find them. Until I got Helena's letter, all I had was the word "Pottersville." There are hundreds." The weariness of the last weeks came back on him. "I searched and searched, but I couldn't discover them."

He thought of Merrick in California, the little blonde girl he'd been sent to meet, who should have been his. Merrick had showed him her photograph: yellow hair, bright eyes, soft little girlish shoulders beneath a scandalously brief top. Buffy, she was called. Buffy, hardly a name for a Slayer--more a name for a tiny ginger kitten. Helena had never looked like that. Even at fifteen, she'd been hard-eyed, rangy, tough--and yet, see what had become of her?

Giles removed his glasses and wiped his eyes. He'd failed Moira, no doubt of that, failed poor, daft Helena. There must have been something he ought to have seen, something he ought to have done. If the Council ever gave him a Slayer of his own, he would not fail her--he would see himself dead before the day he looked upon her lifeless body.

He felt guilty, that he would want such a thing still, after this--to have a Slayer. To train a Slayer, knowing what her life must be. God help him, though, he did want it, and not just as a duty or a burden--Giles wanted and needed it down to his soul. Was that for atonement, the knowledge that he would be kind and decent to his charge, where many were merely harsh taskmasters?

Or, as he feared, was the desire some vestige of Ripper, his old, bad self? That fascination with evil, that willingness to dance between the fire and the darkness--he hadn't cast a spell in nineteen years, and yet he wanted to do so, wanted it badly, as an alcoholic craves drink. With his Slayer's life on the line, Giles knew that he would--and could bury the shame over breaking his fervent vows of abstinence under the certainty that what he'd done was for her, only for her.

Giles could hear Ethan's voice in his head, the voice of the serpent, the tempter, the seducer. "I know what you are, Ripper. I know what you want, and what you are."

"No," he answered, trying to rid himself of those evil, beautiful words. He would never have to listen to Ethan again, or to feel those cruel, supple hands glide over his skin. He would never, never have to be Ripper again.

Moira's eyes had opened, watching him. Her lips formed words only Giles could read, though not even a whisper passed between them. "Mon chevalier mal faite," she called him. That was Launcelot, the ill-made knight, the greatest knight of Camelot: brave, valiant, guilty, suffering, a good man too flawed to look upon the Holy Grail.

As if, in the end, Giles had become neither himself nor the man the Council created: too kind in his nature to accept everything they taught him, their callous, casual acceptance of what was, and what had always been; too trapped in his own creation to tell them entirely to go to hell, and follow his own road, his own better instincts.

Moira understood him too well. She had always understood him too well.

Giles bent to gently touch her cheek. He kissed her cold lips chastely, his tears falling onto her skin, perhaps in place of those she could not, herself, weep.

"It may be," the priest murmured, "The words I said... I have misjudged you."

When Giles turned again, after a little while, his face was a Watcher's mask, smooth and calm and pleasant.

"No, Father," he answered, in his Watcher's voice, which was quiet, and controlled. "No, you were quite correct. I am, indeed, all you said. I am all of that and more."


	4. In Memoriam

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the funeral for the two Watchers who died during Buffy's Cruciamentum, Wesley considers his life - and gets to know his Handler a little better. This takes place right after the events of "Helpless."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The hymn _"Jerusalem"_ is very commonly sung in Britain, though not much anywhere else, for fairly obvious reasons. The words go thus:
> 
>  _And did those feet in ancient time_  
>  Walk upon England’s mountains green?  
>  And was the holy Lamb of God  
>  On England’s pleasant pastures seen?  
>  And did the countenance divine  
>  Shine forth upon our clouded hills?  
>  And was Jerusalem builded here  
>  Among those dark satanic mills?
> 
>  _Bring me my bow of burning gold!_  
>  Bring me my arrows of desire!  
>  Bring me my spear: o clouds unfold!  
>  Bring me my chariots of fire!  
>  I will not cease from mental fight;  
>  Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand  
>  Till we have built Jerusalem  
>  In England’s green and pleasant land.

Here, in the small separate country we call The Compound, we make little show of grief, and our chapel reflects that fact. The oldest structure on our grounds, a single gray room of Norman austerity, it's a place where one experiences little comfort, in senses either spiritual or physical. The uncushioned benches within, apparently constructed of the hardest substance known to humankind, always seem at least twenty degrees cooler than the surrounding air.

What one does experience, in abundance, is the weighty sense of one's duty.

We had come together not so much to mourn the passing of two from our company, but to note that passing, to make it part of the Chronicle of Events: these two died, these words were spoken, in witness sat these Seven of the Council. It's more or less what we do on every occasion: note, analyze, catalogue. We are Watchers. We take classes in logical thought, resisting emotion. We meet the world with calm, seemingly pleasant faces.

We are not, necessarily pleasant people.

At the end of my Second Year, that particular class came directly before my training for resisting torture. Both are considered Old Disciplines, though the torture's done with electricity now, and both Handler and Candidate receive the shocks. It amazes one to see how impassively the Handlers take it--at a certain point I always began to yell, and once I insisted Her Ladyship trade electrodes with me, convinced she could not possibly feel what I felt.

She smiled a little, then, and told me, "Actually, Wesley, it's doubled on my side, to be sure no one gets carried away."

Unbelieving, I flipped the toggle. What she said was true. I screamed, I believe the phrase is, _"Like a little girl."_

But I digress.

At the memorial for Malcolm Blair and Peter Hobson _filius_ , the Seven, robed and hooded, filled the first two rows. From behind, gazing upon that line of broad shoulders draped in heavily pleated black crepe, one could not tell them apart. Each robe but one concealed a man of middle-to-later years, each, beneath an outwardly pleasant exterior, as dry, ironic and unbending as my Uncle Quentin.

I'd miscounted, I realized. Only six Councilors occupied the front benches. The seventh of their number, my own Handler, Moira St. Ives, Lady LeFaye, sat a row behind, still gripping the hand of Hobson _pater_ as the older man trembled, wept, and moaned. The passion of his grief embarrassed me, yet I could not look away. In that moment it seemed real, as nothing else did.

Her Ladyship bent close to the bereaved father, and her face, in profile, resembled that of one of the more experienced and yet sympathetic of the female saints, as depicted by the painters of old--St. Elizabeth, or St. Mary Magdalen at the cross.

The hood had fallen back from Her Ladyship's auburn hair, and her skin appeared ethereally pale in the candlelit gloom. For some reason, which I could not understand, I'd difficulty looking away--del Cielo, to my right, noticed my stare and elbowed me sharply in the side, but I would not acknowledge her insinuating grin.

I loathe insinuation, and of course she understood nothing at all. She never does.

I returned my attention to the front of the chapel.

Blair's mother, a powerfully built, horse-faced woman in a proper dark suit sat stonily silent to Her Ladyship's other side. Mr. Tsu and Mr. Palmer, in academic robes, filled in the remainder of that bench, while the other six Handlers, similarly robed, occupied the pew across the aisle. Behind them sat the four fully-trained Actives currently in England. Council Functionaries: Guards, Technicians, Researchers filled four rows entire. Not all of us who undergo training are able to pass through every one of the Trials; many more possess specific talents or interests and never wish to become Actives.

It was this bleak fate that Her Ladyship had suggested to me, several months before, on a riverbank in the Cotswolds. As I recall, I begged to differ with her opinion.

Last of all, crammed into the back of the chapel, were the Candidates. We twelve of the Third Year had at least been granted seats; while the remaining twenty-plus of the First and Second Years had to lean up against the walls, cramming their bodies into whatever remaining space they might find there.

A wine-red cloth clad the stone altar, the only spot of color in the room, and before that, in their stands, stood the two pewter urns containing the last mortal remains of the deceased.

We Watchers are always cremated, never buried entire, for obvious reasons. A Watcher taken by the enemy is nearly always turned.

Blair, rumour stated, had in fact been turned, only to be staked not by Miss Summers, the Slayer, but by Mr. Giles, the Active Watcher, who of course, during Cruciamentum, ought not to have been anywhere near the testing ground.

The funeral ceremony itself began without warning, dry words spoken in a thin, dry voice by our chaplain, the aptly named Reverend Mr. Doddering, surely the dullest man in England. He'd packed his sermon full of phrases about honour, courage and duty, but his delivery robbed every syllable of meaning. Our eyes, collectively, glazed.

No eulogies followed. Blair and Hobson might have been friendless unknowns, and we a group of utter strangers drawn to the funeral by morbid curiosity or driven indoors by some threatening storm. Yet, I had known Blair, who'd been a Special Assistant of my uncle's, and thought him a decent enough chap.

Up front, Hobson's father continued to sob, his loud cries only somewhat stifled by the press of bodies and the thick stone walls.

At the end of it all, we rose to sing " _Jerusalem_ ," and then recited by rote our Watchers' oath:

We side with Her against the night  
Against the powers of darkness and of chaos.  
Knowledge is our lantern, valour our sword.  
We shall Watch, and shall not turn,  
But stand unbending for as long as we draw breath  
_Tenax et fideles, ut quocunque paratus._

Del Cielo stumbled over the Latin, and whispered to Quatermass, "I've never understood what that means."

" _Steadfast and faithful, prepared on every side,_ " he whispered in return, as row by row we withdrew, none of us the wiser about the manner of our comrades' demise.

By force of habit, the three of us: del Cielo, Quatermass and I, huddled to the chapel's leeward side. The morning's grey clouds had, in fact, begun to deliver snow, just as Her Ladyship predicted. Our breaths steamed in the air, to mingle with the smoke from del Cielo's foul American cigarette.

How can one actually place in one's mouth any object called a " _Camel_?"

"Those will kill you, Maria," Quatermass informed her, with real concern.

"After that farce, Simon, I deserve a smoke. What's up with them? Do they think we'll lose our nerve if we know what really happened?"

"Perhaps we would," Quatermass said, shivering. His pallid skin had turned blue almost immediately upon exiting the chapel. "Oh, Maria, how are we to tell Her Ladyship we're sorry?"

Personally, I wondered why he insisted on making such a row. Earlier, we three had watched one of the Slayer tapes, placed in the Archives for exactly that reason, as a learning tool. Though Lady LeFaye had taken the film afterward, to be recatalogued--it was rather an upsetting one, and contained information of a fairly shocking personal nature regarding Watcher and Slayer--Her Ladyship hadn't seemed unduly upset.

"God," del Cielo groaned. "When I realized she was there, I couldn't believe it. Am I pond scum, or what?"

"No worse than I," Quatermass responded. "I never wished quite so fervently for the earth to open and swallow me whole." He turned to me. "Wyndham-Pryce, you lingered after. Whatever did Her Ladyship say?"

"Nothing in particular, only that she intended to have the tape reentered as a Special Request to protect the Slayer's memory. What else should she say?"

Both stared at me with incredulity.

"Ya know, Windy--" del Cielo ground out the spent end of her Camel beneath the toe of one high-heeled shoe. "Just when I start to give you credit for being human, there you go showing total lack of soul again. I hope you never, ever get turned, 'cause whatever Slayer tried to stake you would have a hell of a time finding that pea-sized heart of yours." She began to circle, her manner quite reminiscent of a ravening wolf. "Hell, I could forgive you for looking like the stiff little plastic groom from the top of a wedding cake, but do you have to act so completely plastic too?"

"Maria," Quatermass cautioned, "That isn't fair. Wyndham-Pryce had no way of knowing--even for ourselves, it's all surmise. Only..." he concluded plaintively. "We'd hoped, rather, that you'd remained to pour oil on troubled waters, as it were."

"What," I said, attempting to keep my voice civil. "Have you, in fact, surmised?"

"Why..." Quatermass appeared astounded. "That the unfortunate young woman on the tape was in fact Helena, Her Ladyship's Slayer. Not _Em_ for _Emily_ , but _M_ for _Moira_ , don't you know?"

"Ah." A series of objects rather like sharp-edged blocks began to shift about within my mind. "I never knew she was..."

And why had I a strange feeling of disappointment? I held no particular prejudices.  Why should it matter to me?

"I don't think she is," del Cielo said. "God knows, I've tried her a couple times and got nothing. Not even a glimmer--though I guess that could be rules or ethics, or..."

"Or something else you know absolutely nothing about." I could not help from interjecting. "Such as good taste on Her Ladyship's part."

"I didn't know _you_ were, Maria," Quatermass told her, perhaps in a vain attempt to intervene.

"What, I'm supposed to wear men's clothes and ugly shoes? Nobody here but Windy's out to perpetuate any stereotypes. Back home we say, 'Don't ask, don't tell.' You, Simon, don't ask. And you, Wes, do not tell. You'll live to regret it if you do."

"Shall I, then?" I turned upon her my mildest and most infuriating expression. I've a thousand of them--each, I'm told, more insufferable than the last. I could swear del Cielo's eyes actually flashed red.

"Though I've no doubt these rounds of bear-baiting amuse you greatly," Lady LeFaye said from behind me. She has a way of seeming to materialize, like a djinn--and always directly at my back, "I should think you three would like to get indoors, out of the snow. I believe there's some sort of wake in the Junior Common Room. Why don't all of you go? Drink an excess of dreadful plonk. Wear lampshades on your heads."

"Pardon?" Quatermass asked, flustered.

"It's an American expression, Simon--one that connotes having rather too much of a good time, the sort one regrets in the morning." Her Ladyship gave that contained, feline smile, the one that does not reach her ice-green eyes. "Only remember, examinations start at seven AM."

Del Cielo groaned. "I'll never make it."

"That's rather the point," Lady LeFaye reminded her.

"Will Mr. Hobson be all right?" Quatermass asked quietly.

"Mr. Blakeney's given him a sedative. He ought to sleep quietly through the night, and Mr. Tsu will sit with him this evening." Her shoulders tightened beneath the sweeping black robe. She turned the odd-looking bracelet round and round on her wrist. I wondered why she wore it at all: as an adornment, the bracelet was an ugly thing, quite in contrast to her usual good taste, yet, inside the compound, she never seemed to be without that particular piece of jewelry. "The security cameras caught a bit of his entrance into the compound, I'm afraid," she continued. "I wasn't quick enough with my spell. We're not, I'm sorry to say, particularly forgiving of our own. At the least, he's likely to be sacked."

"We can't afford to.." I began, but stopped abruptly as the back of her hand tapped sharply against my cheek.

"I've no gauntlet to throw down," Her Ladyship said, with eyes locked to mine, her breath, the warmth of her, terribly close. "But one more word, one syllable, Mr. Wyndham-Pryice, and it's crossed swords behind the gymnasium." Her hand lingered on my shoulder, applying a pressure that, to my distress, I found in no way unpleasant.

"Ah. Yes. Certainly." I swallowed what I'd meant to say.

"Go, you lot, and have fun. I quite expect to hear drunken snowball fights beneath my window this evening, and for at least one of you to carry the day. Make me proud."

"How old do you think we are?" Quatermass asked, smiling.

"All young enough, still, to wrest a bit of enjoyment from life." Her Ladyship moved away from me to squeeze Quatermass's arm affectionately. "'Night, loves, see you tomorrow." With that, she strolled away from us, shrugging out of her all-encompassing robe as she went, heedless of the snow, her movements powerful, catlike, dangerous.

 _Indeed a dangerous woman,_ I reminded myself. _A sorceress._

"May I marry her when I grow up?" Quartermass asked wistfully.

"Stand on line," Miss Del Ciello told him.

Though meant harmlessly, I supposed, their words irked me. Neither noticed when I left their company.

 

At Uncle Quentin's insistence, I have rooms on Compound, instead of keeping a flat of my own in town. It's more convenient, I suppose, and spares expense, yet the rooms have thick stone walls that seem to shed a particularly bone-chilling brand of cold when one stands too close, and no amount of draperies or cushions can make the windowseat habitable, except in the very warmest days of high summer. What natural light manages to penetrate possesses an odd, subterranean quality that reminds one of January in the Middle Ages. The windowpane, for security, is caged in iron bars.

If I wrote verse, which of course I do not, I shouldn't even be able to state--as did Richard Lovelace, the courtly poet--that " _Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage."_ I've no beloved Althea to warm my thoughts, as the poet did, nor never have had. My rooms might just as well be a gaol, my family and tradition more effective gaolers than any in Her Majesty's prisons.

Upon entering my room, through force of habit, I glanced about: bed, desk, chair, a wardrobe of nearly identical dark suits, a bookshelf packed with reference volumes of esoteric lore. No intruders, no danger here.

A formal portrait of my mum and sisters, taken two years previously, hung on one wall. They all wore hats, like the women of the Royal Family, and appeared vaguely disapproving--the broad Travers face lends itself well to just such looks. I didn't love them, never had, I realized, not even the middle one, Anthea, who, being merely blandly stupid, is somewhat less beastly than cruel Caterina or horrid Honoria. In a fit of pique, I nudged the picture off its hook. Glass shattered as its frame hit the stone floor, but I didn't clean it up. The way I felt, it could lie there forever, but I supposed one of the scouts, our servants, would attend to it presently.

For no more than an instant, I contemplated joining my teammates at the end-of-training-year party currently masquerading as a wake, then discarded the idea--why should I sit silent in their midst or, worse yet, languish up against one wall, to be jostled and laughed at, ignored by the gregarious, half-drunk, irrepressibly-snogging lot of them?

I might as well have been a monk, bound by vows of chastity. There was nothing for it, I decided, but to go for a run. A run in the snow, just the thing to clear one's head and torture one's body until all disturbing thoughts were safely driven back by the pain, to lodge in one's subconscious where they belonged.

Once out of doors, however, I regretted the notion almost immediately. Directly I left the dormitories, in fact. Even with gloves and a polar fleece jacket over my tracksuit, the cold had become intense, and my breath created great gusts of steam in the air. Still, I made myself stretch carefully. Cold was only cold; I could bear it, as I'd been trained. In the course of my career I ought to expect, often, to be cold.

I crossed the grounds at a slow jog, the exercise, in fact, serving to warm me slightly, although my trainers slipped a bit on the accumulated snowfall. We'd an actual running track tucked between the gymnasium and the back wall--my fellows ran there in nearly all weathers, but this afternoon, between the snow and the approaching darkness, I expected to have the course to myself.

I wasn't alone. Some hardy soul had beat me to the track and was running its circuit at prodigious speed. Oh, God, a hurdler. I have a secret horror of hurdles, though I'll run them when required--but like a horse shying from a jump, I've always the premonition that I'm bound to fall. Ten years ago, such active coursework wasn't part of our curriculum--one can hardly imagine any of the Council themselves running laps or jumping hurdles, and that goes for the better part of the Handlers and Active Watchers as well. It all seems a bit too much for me, what we're expected to be and to know, and I wonder, sometimes, who we have to blame for yet another "New Discipline."

As I ran, though, it struck me again what we'd viewed on the tape, and began to shiver in earnest. All that we learned, all we were able to master, New Disciplines or Old--in such our situation, our skills could never be enough. A thorough knowledge of ancient languages and good aerobic fitness provide little enough protection against large numbers of evil demons panting for one's death.

The hurdler lapped me, going hard, though I couldn't even hear the sound of his breath--or hers, like me, the figure was bundled into tracksuit and fleece, rendering gender indeterminate. The inky black of its clothing made its shape indistinct, a phantom.

I plodded along in the spectre's wake, hoping something would kick in--the endorphins, or runner's high one is promised. It never does. I merely felt out of sorts, and sore, quite unloving of everyone and everything, like the unrepentant Mr. Scrooge at Christmas.

Today's memorial had indeed been a farce. In that, for once, I would have to agree with del Cielo. Pity about Blair, certainly, but the younger Mr. Hobson, I recalled--though well-spoken enough and possessed of a Cambridge degree--had the native intelligence of a kumquat, and as a Third Year to my First, had never missed a chance to speak disparagingly of me.

I would, I decided, show them all. I would.

The hurdler, going like fire, lapped me a second time. I ground to a halt. Oh, Lord, why bother? I watched my silent companion reach the next set of jumps a quarter-turn of the track ahead. Rather a pleasure, really, to observe his form, the way those long, black-clad legs tucked up without conscious thought to clear the bar.

One jump, two, three--and disaster struck. The legs tucked up, but not correctly, and the runner came down, half tangled in the missed hurdle, his body, with the momentum, flung hard across the top bar of the fourth.

"My God!" I heard myself shout, and took off toward the accident with a speed I might well have been proud of earlier. The other wasn't moving, and I'd visions of some terrible injury--paralysis, a damaged spine.

I skidded to my knees in the snow, laying my hand across the other's brow. "Lie quite still now. Can you tell me where you're hurt?"

"In the dignity, mainly, I should think," answered a familiar voice. "Give me a moment, though, to take stock."

"Your Ladyship?" Quite unconsciously, my hands unzipped her jacket and moved down her body, seeking, I think, for broken bones, encountering, instead, firm breasts, a trim waist, the soft curves of hip and thigh.

"Ah!" she exclaimed. "Please don't."

"Oh!" I all but shrieked, mortified by what I'd done. "I... please don't imagine... I beg your pardon, Ma'am."

"Wesley," she said to me, laughing, "It's quite all right." She made as if to roll away from the damaged hurdle. Gently as I could, I untangled its framework from her legs. "Though it appears that I owe the Council a new piece of equipment."

"Yes, dead loss, I'm afraid." I showed her the top bar, bent to the shape of a boomerang.

She laughed again, the sound ending in a gasp. "Oh, Lord, what poetry in motion I am!"

"But you were!" I exclaimed. "Quite lovely, it... er..." I cleared my throat, realizing what I'd begun. "It was beautiful, the way you ran.  That is to say... ah... your form.  Your form when running."

"Why, Wesley, thank you." The smile she turned upon me was one I hadn't seen before; I began to shiver rather violently. "I always thought you considered me--I don't know--an ogress? A harridan?"

"Your Ladyship!"

"And that's another thing, Viscount Henton-on-Rowe."

"I'd... ah... prefer you did not call me by that name."

"Just as I'd prefer you called me Moira, or Guv'nor, or St. Ives, but you don't now, Wesley, do you? Do you imagine I'm any fonder of my family that you are of yours?"

"But we all call you that."

"Yes, you all do, because you began it, and the others listened and took their cues from you. Simon's family spent all their money to send him to a good school. They're middle class, at best, and he wants to be correct. Poor Maria is entirely out of her element and trying to brazen things out the best she can. You've listened to your uncle, who is so damnably old-school traditional it makes my blood run cold. My title only matters to men like him, and I prefer to only use it in that context."

"I never knew."

She made as if to sit up, but fell back again. "I believe I shall need you to help me. You've good strong hands, haven't you, Wesley?"

"Strong enough."

"My hip's come out of joint, and I need you to pop it back in for me."

"Ma'am..." The mere thought made me queasy. "Oughtn't I call Dr. Blakeney, fetch help--"

"Yes, please, Wesley. I should quite like to lie out here for half an hour in the snow, whilst you try to discover which of your fellow Candidates the aptly named Roger Blakeney's shagging this week--and by the by, don't repeat that bit of intelligence, if you'd be so kind."

"Certainly not, but Ma'am..."

"It's my left leg--no, love, that's your left, my right, other one, please. Grasp it firmly at ankle and knee, that's it. I warn you, it'll be dead heavy, but this is easy, it's just a knack. Bend the knee up toward my chest, now to the side..." She talked me, step by step, through what I needed to do, but on the first go, I merely heard bone grate over bone, and Her Ladyship muttered, almost reflectively, "Ah, Merciful Goddess above us all."

"I'm dreadfully... I can't do this... Ma'am..."

"You can do it love, just give it another go. Hurry now."

Desperate, I tried again, twisting and pushing according to her directions as hard as I could, and was rewarded with an audible "pop."

"There, that's done it. Nicely managed. I knew you wouldn't fail me."

I ducked my head, a little dizzy, blushing furiously at her words, which were quite unlike anything that had ever been said to me. I touched her hip lightly. "Is it still very painful?"

"Mmn, not bad. Help me up?"

I helped her to sit, and then rise to her feet, seeing at once that it was still quite painful for her to put any weight at all on that leg. "Please do lean on me, Ma'am," I offered.

"Since you put it so chivalrously, I shall. Thank you, Wesley."

We made our slow way across the grounds, arms about each others' waists, like lovers. I tried to ignore her nearness, the long thigh bumping mine, the way her breast nudged against my chest, the mere fact of her nearness. I hadn't been so close to a woman in such a long time, since before I began my training in fact, that it went right through me. To my horror, I felt my body begin to respond.

"Let's go to my study," said Her Ladyship. We had reached the front steps of Main, where all the Handlers' studies are located, in a sort of sub-level.

I gasped, attempting vainly to put my mind back on track. "As you wish."

Her Ladyship laughed, and I looked at her quizzically.

"It's an American film..." She gasped as well, taking one step, then another. "Bloody hell, that hurts!"

At last we made it to the top, and I opened the door. "An American film that I particularly like, called _The Princess Bride_. In it there's a farmboy named Westley, who loves a beautiful girl, and every time she asks something of him, he answers..." We came to the end of the corridor, and descended the five little twisting steps. "'As you wish,' which is finally how she realizes that he loves her."

"Ah."

She located a key pinned inside her pocket, and unlocked the door, which swung inward. "So, my Wesley, will you enter, or must you leave me here?"

I've no idea what made me say it--loneliness, I suppose, or the strangeness of the night. For a moment, I could not make myself remember what she was: my superior, a member of the Seven, my Handler. A sorceress, and a woman who continually went against our traditions, flouted our rules. My Uncle Quentin's mortal enemy. I couldn't consider that she must have been thirteen years older than I, chronologically--centuries older in experience. I had every reason to distrust and suspect her--every reason but for Moira herself, and so I found that I could not. She was an astounding woman, standing extremely close to me, intelligent, complex, capable of laughter and anger and passion--in short, everything the bevies of shopworn debutantes my mother paraded before me would not and could never hope to be.

In this fit of madness, I laid my hand lightly upon her back, just at the curve of her waist, and looked down into her eyes--only a little, tall as she was. Such an amazing green, those eyes, with circles of true gold around each iris. " _As you wish_ ," I told her then, softly, so softly I almost wondered if she'd hear.

Moira jerked away from me, back into the shelter of her doorway, a wild glare in her eyes. Even though she balanced on one foot after her accident at the running track, the impulse toward flight showed in every line of her body.

"I... ah... er... Ma'am..." I stammered. "I never meant..."

"It's that bloody tape, isn't it? Another Goddamned thing to use against me." The glare had become a dark, burning look that truly frightened me. I stepped backward, adding distance. "Why don't you see if your uncle's still up?" She lurched into her study, took the video from her desk and flung it at me. "I don't know how he missed it. Gross negligence. Gross immoral conduct. Gross something."

Suddenly boneless, she sank to the floor, her body rocking, head clutched between her hands. "He's been trying to dispose of me for years. Go on, bugger off. Bring the bastard his ammunition."

"Your Ladyship," I said formally. "Did you learn such appalling language from your Slayer, or she from you?"

She glanced up, her face streaked with angry tears. From that, I knew her to be a natural redhead, for her fair skin, normally so flawless, blotched most alarmingly.

"Come now." I stepped into the room and bent to lift her to her feet. Astonished by the act, nearly dead weight, she was amazingly heavy. For a moment I feared I'd drop her and complete our mutual humiliation. "Come now, Ma'am."

Having finally stood her upright, I wrapped my arms around her body, holding her close, her form fitting so well against mine we might have been meant to stand together. I'd held few enough women for a man my age, truth be told, never one so... I can't even think of a word, only that she excited me with all the deliciousness of her experience, her danger, the promise of the forbidden. A woman whom, I suspected, would truly stop at nothing, as free in herself as I was bound.

"Not just now, Wesley," she told me, kindly enough--and I realized that one hand had strayed to her uninjured leg, to caress her long firm thigh, to travel over the lovely hard roundness of her bum--and that the door to the corridor stood wide open for all to see.

"Of course," I responded, and removed myself to a respectful distance, helping her to lie on the sofa as one might help an infirm aunt. Attempting to hide my disappointment, I shut the door before I sat on the other end to unlace her trainers and slip them from her feet, while Her Ladyship watched me with those remarkable, unreadable green eyes.

"You quite meant to do that, didn't you?" she asked, after a passage of time. "Not for the reasons stated earlier, but for yourself."

"It was foolish of me, I know." I felt my face burning. "Quite contrary to our training." God, what a twit I was! What an utter, irredeemable twit. How she must be laughing at me inside, though too well-bred to show any exterior sign.

"For how long, Wesley?" Her Ladyship asked. Her eyes looked pitying. I could not stand the look, and yet I could not lie--I'd always been nearly as poor at falsehood as I had at romance.

"Since the river," I told her simply, and took a handkerchief from my pocket, reaching up to remove my spectacles and polish the lenses.

Her Ladyship laughed softly. "You're wearing your contact lenses, Wesley."

"So I am." I laughed a little with her, however falsely, and contented myself with wiping my hands on the cloth.

"Rupert always did that," she told me, "When he was nervous, or upset, or stalling for time. One of his little habits. Wesley, say no."

"No, Ma'am? To what?"

"The Council intends to send you to California, to take over Rupert's place. You could write _'I love evil demons and wish to help their increase in every way possible'_ on your examination paper tomorrow, and nothing else, and you'd still be sent on your way." She reached for my arm, running her thumb down the soft inner skin--a remarkably sensual touch, that sent shivers of pleasure through my body, yet I pulled away, suspicious now of her as she'd been previously of me. "You don't want it, do you, not that way? Through nepotism, rather than merit?"

"You believe I have no merit?"

"I believe you aren't yet ready to step into this assignment. It's a difficult situation as it is: civilians involved, a powerful bond between Watcher and Slayer, a bloody dangerous killing ground. A second Slayer in the picture, who by all accounts is, at least, unstable, and ought to have been sent back here for evaluation."

"But to have a Slayer of my own..." I glanced at her, knowing that my eyes must be shining, ecstatic at the prospect, that I'd not expected to come for another ten years, if at all. "Ma'am, to be given a Slayer of my own. Two Slayers!"

"Wesley," she said quietly, but with a Handler's authority. "Buffy won't be your Slayer. She will never be your Slayer. No matter how many regulations you quote to her, no matter what orders you issue, she will never be yours. And Faith will be no one's. She watched her last Watcher die, and she ran. Do you want it to be this way? Think of what I told you by the river. Think of your vow: can you honestly say you're ' _prepared on every side_?'"

"Were you?" I answered in return.

"One never can be," she answered, leaning back against the armrest, laying an arm across her eyes.

"There you are," I told her.

"We'll see how you do on the Slaying run tomorrow night. If you do well, I'll retract everything I've said, and give you my blessing."

"Fairly spoken, " I answered, but the mood had long since been destroyed between us. I got to my feet. "I ought..."

Her Ladyship did not move her arm.

"Will you be all right? Can I...?"

"Just go," she told me. "It's late, and I've no doubt you've revision to do before tomorrow's examinations."

"I suppose I ought..."

"There are a great many things you ought to do, Wesley. But you don't, do you?" Again, she sounded angry, disappointed in me.

I left without another word.


End file.
